


Country of Ghosts

by aderyn



Category: Sherlock (TV), Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms
Genre: Afghanistan, Army!John
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-12-20
Updated: 2011-12-20
Packaged: 2017-10-27 14:39:21
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 794
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/296934
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aderyn/pseuds/aderyn
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>London is not calling John Watson...yet.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Country of Ghosts

**Author's Note:**

> Another piece of a series of short things with different POV's and from different points in the timeline. This one is John alone in a country of ghosts.

 

 _The dead are our nearest neighbors; they are all around us_.  
 _—John O’Donohue_

 __

John Watson is standing outside a tented medical facility in Helmand, Afghanistan, watching a steppe eagle circling overhead, riding the desert thermals without apparent purpose. It’s not a vulture; that’s good. (Nothing against vultures, but the associations are obvious.) He thinks: Why are we here?  He doesn't mean it existentially. He means, why are we here in this country where we are, quite arguably, mucking up geopolitics beyond all hope of repair? And killing and dying in the process. Offence and defence, he thinks; in the end it all comes out as a loss.

 Afghanistan is a country of ghosts.  There are the recently departed, of course. Two days ago a young man (massive injuries,ginger hair) bled out on his table before he could even locate the source of the bleeding; unusual for him, but every time he loses someone he gives up a bit of his locus, his core. He’s very steady, John, so centered through to his fingers that he’s sometimes called _laas_ (“hand,” in the Pashto they’ve picked up), by his fellow medical personnel. But he’s not so good that he won’t be haunted.

Then there are the others: the past invaders--Ghengis Khan, Alexander the Great-- whose violence still lingers in the harsh landscape; the shadow players of the Great Game between the Empires as they hurtled towards modernity; the ghost soldiers, the _mujahideen_ whom in the 80’s the Russians referred to as _dukhi,_ ghosts; the _jinn_ that the people here spin stories about, who exist to sicken and to trick, to lead us from our righteous paths into a howling moral wilderness: Tempted in the desert.  Maybe not. Afghanistan does not make John consider desire. He’s forgotten what that is.

There are ghost-children who haunt empty towers and apartment complexes. People trapped in their houses with their dead relatives, too terrified of the chaos outside to give them the proper rituals.

And the future ghosts. So many of those.

He hears a helicopter, incoming, not far off. An American Blackhawk medevac, by the sound of it; how sad that he knows that. He thinks about the injured inside, the mad scramble to triage, the choices his compatriots will have to make in order to salvage what life they can.

He thinks about landing at Kandahar airport—dust-veiled by day; better at night but not by much. Thinks about how from a plane (or a steppe eagle’s vantage), one might not easily tell the more dangerous areas from the less dangerous. How they might all blend together in featureless desolation of threat. No evidence at all. No telling detail that might lead to safety.

The fine hairs prickle at the back of his neck. He isn't easily alarmed--one can't be when an ordinary day might involve sorting the aftermath of an IED. But there's always a sense of impending doom here. And the desert is unsettling, always unsettling, a geography of shifts and of contradictions. Yesterday he saw a soldier with a temperature of 42 degrees—heatstroke-- and another whose frostbite was severe enough to require amputation.  John has a gift for embracing extremes, but here every paradox means to do harm.

There are ghosts everywhere here, unfriendly genii who haunt their rocks, who wish to be left to haunt undisturbed. Sometimes he feels as though he’s one of them.  Adrenaline will wear one transparent eventually, no matter how much he anticipates the rush, or how good he is at using it (to save lives, and, occasionally, to kill). John Watson is always tired; the shadows under his eyes are so deeply settled that even with sleep, even without vigilance, they would not begin to lighten for more than a year. He wears his fatigue as easily as he does his weapon; they are, in this space and time, inextricable parts of what he is.

He doesn’t know that sleep can get scarcer and more terrifying than it is now. He doesn't know that in six months he'll be gone --from this country, from this version of his life-- never to return. He doesn’t think about how this chapter, terminal as it is, might predict and figure the one that comes next.

 He doesn't hear the city of London—overcast, rain expected, full of its own ghosts-- calling out to him, as places will do. He doesn’t have any premonitions. (Of what? Certainly not of mad cab rides and crime scenes and a strange genius of a different sort who can read his stories, all of this, in his face and his gait and his mobile phone). He's just trying to stay alive, maybe keep some other people alive too, for a little while longer.


End file.
